it's a ‹body›building blog

1. Secure passwords made easy

   written by Bartek Szopka on 11th March 2010

   The use of passwords (or watchwords) is ancient authentication method, but we are stuck with it (until some revolutionary standardised biometric human recognition technique will be invented). The biggest pain about passwords is that we have to remember them – and we are damn lazy. Things like password, qwerty and 123456 happen to be one of the most commonly used passwords. Yes, we are that lazy. And our laziness goes even further, because we are often so proud of our password, that we use it everywhere.

   That’s why I’d like to share my own technique of creating and memorizing secure passwords. It’s quite flexible, so I’m not afraid to ‘open-source’ it ;)

   Read the rest of the 'Secure passwords made easy' article...

2. Blogging for Geeks

   written by Bartek Szopka on 13th February 2010

   Blogging is all about creating useful content in a form of blog posts or articles. But it seems that my work on this blog was much more focused on making the process of blogging simpler for me, than on delivering actual content. That’s why from time to time I was just jumping from one blogging platform to another trying to find a place for my own. And oops!… I did it again.

   Read the rest of the 'Blogging for Geeks' article...

3. #RuPy 2009

   written by Bartek Szopka on 13th November 2009

   Last weekend I took part in RuPy — a ‘strongly dynamic conference’ about Ruby, Python and related technologies. Even though I don’t use these languages in my everyday programming work I really enjoy trying them in my side-projects, so I found some points from RuPy’s agenda quite interesting.

   This post is meant to be a summary of my RuPy experiences — for me to remember what I’ve learnt and for anyone who has been on this conference and/or considers taking part in it next year.

   Read the rest of the '#RuPy 2009' article...

4. 'this' is not always what it seems to be

   written by Bartek Szopka on 9th October 2009

   Recently, while developing some simple stuff with jQuery, I came across strange problem with strings in JavaScript. After hours of debugging and investigating, it turned out to be a result of confusion between primitive strings and String objects in JavaScript. If you don’t want to repeat my mistakes and would like to understand a little bit more about strings in JavaScript, this post is for you.

   Read the rest of the ''this' is not always what it seems to be' article...

5. Fighting comment spam

   written by Bartek Szopka on 8th May 2009

   Some time ago I released this new version of my blog with very simple comment functionality. It didn’t take too long for comment-spam bots to find it and flood me with some very useful links…

   It’s quite obvious that you simply can’t build any public comment form without any mean of spam prevention.

   Read the rest of the 'Fighting comment spam' article...

6. Waking up

   written by Bartek Szopka on 9th March 2009

   It has been a while (months to be precise) since my last post here. And I don’t have any good excuse for not writing for such a long time…

   I was (and I am) kinda busy… but being busy also means lots of quite interesting things to blog about. And that’s probably the reason I wanted to wake up this blog. But when I saw it after few months break I didn’t like the way it looked and the way it worked… So instead of writing to a blog I started to code the new blog… Is there any simpler web application to create? So I unified the forces of Google App Engine and Django and created my own pure and simple blog implementation… Finally I have the level of flexibility I needed in blogging engines.

   So, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a preview of new <body/>building blog…

   I really hope to launch it quite soon but I’m aware of some IE6 issues (should I care less?) and comments area is still under development… And there are so many little things I’d like to add here and there but don’t have time for all of them…

   As it will probably take ages to get everything as perfect as I’d like, I’ll just launch it early and improve in time… What do you think? (If no one cares to answer, just make it a rhetorical question ;)

7. Automatic Visual Testing of Web Applications

   written by Bartek Szopka on 25th July 2008

   The topic of automatic visual testing returns to me like a boomerang. There are a lot of tools for automatic testing of the back-end (unit tests, integration tests, etc…) in every programming language you can possibly imagine. They even have the whole methodology of Test Driven Development. For testing the front-end we have Selenium or Ruby based Watir, but still all they test is the functionality of the web application or a website, and not the visual look of it.

   I’d like a tool, that will automagically tell me, if my web application still looks how it was intended to look. I need to know if my CSS refactoring didn’t break the whole thing somewhere on a page I don’t even look at, when I’m manually clicking.

   Is it really possible to automate visual testing? And if it is, will it be useful?

   Read the rest of the 'Automatic Visual Testing of Web Applications' article...

8. Modeling Family Relations

   written by Bartek Szopka on 26th June 2008

   Humans are really complicated beings. Relations between humans are even more complicated…

   A while ago I’ve written an article about my small genealogy project. After quite fast implementation of data gathering tools (thanks to django admin panel) I got a little stuck with trying to visualize family tree.

   Read the rest of the 'Modeling Family Relations' article...

9. My inline-block 'O RLY?' moment

   written by Bartek Szopka on 26th May 2008

   Last week Chris Coyier blogged about those CSS “Ah-ha!” moments, when you realise how cool and powerful stylesheets are. On the same day I had one of my CSS “O RLY?” moments. This one was all about inline-block value of the display property.

   Read the rest of the 'My inline-block 'O RLY?' moment' article...

10. Genealogy in the Time of Web 2.0

    written by Bartek Szopka on 16th May 2008

    In every family there is such a time when someone starts to looking into family roots. It seems that it’s that time for my family, as my father created lots of paper sheets with quite random pack of names and lines joining them.

    He asked:

    Bartek, maybe you will write some app to organize this thing, keep it all together? In few months I’ll forget who is who on this papers.

    What could I answer?

    Yeay! Why not! Seems like fun.

    But, as once I was told that good programmer is a lazy programmer. So as a lazy programmer I started with googling some genealogy software and on-line family trees :)

    Read the rest of the 'Genealogy in the Time of Web 2.0' article...

11. Semantic Mark-up of an Article Page

    written by Bartek Szopka on 9th May 2008

    Last time we where discussing semantic mark-up of blog’s home page. With all this knowledge we can smoothly move forward and mark up the page with full article contents and visitors’ comments.

    The process will be very similar to one we used for home page, so if you haven’t read previous article, please do it as it will be really helpful. If you already been there don’t hesitate and read on :)

    Read the rest of the 'Semantic Mark-up of an Article Page' article...

12. Semantic Mark-up of the Home Page

    written by Bartek Szopka on 28th April 2008

    When you start to build a website and you have a general idea about content it will contain, you very often move on to designing the visual part of it and later this visualisation gets marked up into XHTML styled with CSS. It’s not a bad way to do it, but in such process in most cases mark-up gets focused much more on the visual part of the design than on semantic meaning of the content.

    That’s why the process of building a website should be split into clear steps. I’m just testing such iteration approach while creating this blog and I’ll document every step in further posts. Marking up the home page is the first one to go.

    Read the rest of the 'Semantic Mark-up of the Home Page' article...

13. HAI WORLD!

    written by Bartek Szopka on 24th April 2008

    HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE